I was wholly captivated by Lily King’s “Euphoria,” drawn from the life of Margaret Mead, specifically a few fraught months in 1933 when she worked with indigenous tribes in the jungles of New Guinea. King evocatively reimagines a love triangle between Mead and two colleagues (one her current, second husband and the other her eventual third) as they grapple with jealousy, greed, loneliness, fame, resentment, sexual tension, and an increasing sense of foreboding. It’s a vivid gem of a book, with a devastating denouement that haunted me long after I turned the final page.

~*~

Rabih Alameddine, author of “An Unnecessary Woman” (Grove Press)

“Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)

Had you asked me before November, I would have said my favorite book was “Fourth of July Creek” by Smith Henderson. But then I read Claudia Rankine's “Citizen,” which I found to be moving, stunning, and formally innovative--in short, a masterwork.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/12/26/authors_favorite_books_the_ultimate_literary_guide_to_2014/feed/3“Sometimes ‘being a writer’ totally sucks”: Why the year-end Notable Books race causes so much angsthttp://www.salon.com/2014/12/04/sometimes_being_a_writer_totally_sucks_why_the_year_end_notable_book_race_causes_so_much_angst/
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/04/sometimes_being_a_writer_totally_sucks_why_the_year_end_notable_book_race_causes_so_much_angst/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 21:00:00 +0000Erin Keanehttp://www.salon.com/?p=13836639The end of the year is a natural time for retrospection, and aggregating critical work already written throughout the year helps fill out book coverage during those lean weeks when the new release pipelines freeze for the holidays. Enter the year-end best-of lists, where books released earlier in the year can get a second wind in time for the holidays, and authors who weren’t short-listed for major awards can gain a little bump before the window on the year in publishing closes.

Even books that aren’t best-sellers or medal-winners can come out on top in December if they make the right lists. Publishers Weekly lists a top 10 overall and a best-of list for several genres, including separate categories for poetry, romance, SF/Fantasy/Horror and picture books. Most of the major papers offer their own year-end lists — the Washington Post, even NPR. The Wall Street Journal even built a handy aggregator that lists the most notable of the notable. But it’s still the New York Times Sunday Book Review that hits the hardest with its 100 Notable Books list, published Tuesday.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/12/04/sometimes_being_a_writer_totally_sucks_why_the_year_end_notable_book_race_causes_so_much_angst/feed/25Ed Champion is more than an angry blogger: What to do about the men who abuse women?http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/ed_champion_is_more_than_an_angry_blogger_what_to_do_about_the_men_who_abuse_women/
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/ed_champion_is_more_than_an_angry_blogger_what_to_do_about_the_men_who_abuse_women/#commentsMon, 29 Sep 2014 18:59:00 +0000kmcdonoughhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13783739Last week, a book critic named Ed Champion publicly threatened a writer named Porochista Khakpour because he felt she had slighted him in some way. After tweeting a stream of invective at Khakpour, Champion announced that unless she apologized to him by 11:00 PM, he would reveal a detail about Khakpour's life that he believed would harm and humiliate her. The specifics of that ultimatum are less important here than the enthusiasm with which Champion set about his work of threatening Khakpour.

"Five minutes," began one tweet as his deadline approached. "The publishing industry has done nothing for me. Give me one good goddamn reason not to divulge the details," he wrote next. Finally, he tweeted what he had threatened to, though he promptly deleted it. Khakpour, responding in real time, tweeted requests for help.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/09/29/ed_champion_is_more_than_an_angry_blogger_what_to_do_about_the_men_who_abuse_women/feed/61Internet predators, vicious Amazon reviews, and how Mitt Romney’s smile inspired a novelhttp://www.salon.com/2014/09/11/internet_predators_vicious_amazon_reviews_and_how_mitt_romneys_smile_inspired_a_novel/
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/11/internet_predators_vicious_amazon_reviews_and_how_mitt_romneys_smile_inspired_a_novel/#commentsThu, 11 Sep 2014 17:40:00 +0000Laura Bennetthttp://www.salon.com/?p=13769825As always, autumn has yielded a bumper crop of new fiction. So I posed a series of questions--with a few verbal restrictions--to Matthew Thomas ("We Are Not Ourselves," a novel already out), Emily St. John Mandel ("Station Eleven," a novel available Sept. 9), Dylan Landis ("Rainey Royal," a novel available Sept. 9), John Warner, "Tough Day for the Army," stories available Sept. 15), and Lindsay Hunter ("Ugly Girls," a novel available Nov. 4).

Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

THOMAS: The persistence of hope in the face of certain defeat; the refusal to despair; a brief moment of triumph; years spent chasing an idyll; in short, an alternate history of the New York Mets.

LANDIS: A girl in trouble named Rainey Royal. Also jazz, sex, cigarettes, New York, 1970s, girls and men, friendships and cruelty, art, and Saint Catherine of Bologna.

MANDEL: It’s about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It's also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/09/11/internet_predators_vicious_amazon_reviews_and_how_mitt_romneys_smile_inspired_a_novel/feed/1Hachette CEO to Amazon: Withdraw the sanctions you have imposed against our authorshttp://www.salon.com/2014/08/11/hachette_ceo_to_amazon_withdraw_the_sanctions_you_have_imposed_against_our_authors/
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/11/hachette_ceo_to_amazon_withdraw_the_sanctions_you_have_imposed_against_our_authors/#commentsMon, 11 Aug 2014 16:15:00 +0000pguptahttp://www.salon.com/?p=13745658Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch is firing back at Amazon, asking the tech giant to "withdraw the sanctions against Hachette’s authors" as the quarrel between the publisher and Amazon continues.

Earlier in August Amazon released an open letter to its reader on ReadersUnited.com. The note gives a brief history of the advent of paperback books, and states, "Fast forward to today, and it's the e-book's turn to be opposed by the literary establishment." The Amazon letter also encourages readers to email Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch asking him to give in to Amazon demands.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/08/11/hachette_ceo_to_amazon_withdraw_the_sanctions_you_have_imposed_against_our_authors/feed/7Amazon to authors: Pipe down about publishing warhttp://www.salon.com/2014/07/24/amazon_to_authors_pipe_down_about_the_amazon_hachette_battle/
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/24/amazon_to_authors_pipe_down_about_the_amazon_hachette_battle/#commentsThu, 24 Jul 2014 17:00:00 +0000Sarah Grayhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13732770The Amazon vs. Hachette war remains unresolved. However, the front is heating up between Amazon and those largely affected by the stalemate: authors. Several hundred authors have signed a letter requesting that Amazon leave them out of the fray.

Amazon has responded by making offers to the authors; it has also asked that the authors quiet their outcry against the tech giant, according to Publishers Weekly.

The man leading the charge on the authors' side is Douglas Preston. In late June, the best-selling Preston began circulating a letter asking Amazon to leave authors out of its ongoing dispute with the publishing group Hachette. He told Publishers Weekly, in early July, that he hoped to persuade "12 courageous authors" to sign the letter and was surprised by the overwhelming hundreds -- including Stephen King, Nora Roberts and James Patterson -- who were willing to sign. The signees are not just those published by Hachette's imprints. Publishers Weekly reported:

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/07/24/amazon_to_authors_pipe_down_about_the_amazon_hachette_battle/feed/4Amazon-backed book award rejected by distinguished authorhttp://www.salon.com/2014/07/10/amazon_backed_book_award_rejected_by_distinguished_author/
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/10/amazon_backed_book_award_rejected_by_distinguished_author/#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 17:05:00 +0000Sarah Grayhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13722355Allan Ahlberg, the well-known author of more than 150 children's books, announced that he declined a Lifetime Achievement Award from the inaugural Booktrust Best Book Awards. Why turn down this award, and the 5,000 pounds that come with it? Because the award is sponsored by Amazon.

In a letter the 76-year-old author, whose writing career spans four decades, told the Bookseller that he turned down the award on ethical grounds, namely reports that Amazon has been avoiding taxes by basing headquarters in Luxembourg. In a letter to the Bookseller he wrote:

"Tax, fairly applied to us all, is a good thing. It pays for schools, hospitals -- libraries! When companies like Amazon cheat -- paying 0.1% on billions, pretending it is earning money not in the UK, but in Luxembourg -- that's a bad thing. We should surely, at the very least, say hat is is bad and on no account give them any support or, by association, respectability."

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/07/10/amazon_backed_book_award_rejected_by_distinguished_author/feed/16Dinesh D’Souza’s paranoid nightmare: Everything is a vast conspiracy against himhttp://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/dinesh_dsouza_everything_is_a_vast_conspiracy_against_dinesh_dsouza/
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/dinesh_dsouza_everything_is_a_vast_conspiracy_against_dinesh_dsouza/#commentsWed, 09 Jul 2014 17:44:00 +0000Jim Newellhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13720537The vast forces of the universe and the United States government and the powers that be have arrayed themselves against one man, one prodigy, who could obliterate their regime of smoke, mirrors and lies: Dinesh D'Souza, the former Reagan era policy adviser and hot-ticket conservative intellectual who, more recently, has become a hand-waving, fear-mongering fake-tree salesman, and criminal.

He is, in other words, the right's Job. But the longer he suffers, the more selectively he's prosecuted, the more his art is censored, the stronger he becomes!

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/dinesh_dsouza_everything_is_a_vast_conspiracy_against_dinesh_dsouza/feed/114Jeff Bezos offers authors a bribehttp://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/jeff_bezos_offers_authors_a_bribe/
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/jeff_bezos_offers_authors_a_bribe/#commentsWed, 09 Jul 2014 16:15:00 +0000Andrew Leonardhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13721364In the surprisingly public ongoing feud over e-book pricing between Amazon and Hachette, it is difficult to see Jeff Bezos' latest gambit -- a temporary offer to allow authors to keep all the proceeds from sales of their books on Amazon -- as anything other than an outright bribe. Amazon wants to peel away the loyalties of writers who have been supporting Hachette against the online retailer. So it is offering them straight-up cash.

Is Amazon feeling the heat? The news that Amazon was blocking preorders and delaying deliveries of Hachette titles has clearly hurt Amazon's brand. As David Streitfeld observed in the New York Times, Amazon " has never suffered as much sustained criticism as it is getting now." Whether or not you believe that the traditional publishing conglomerates are guilty of all manner of their own sins, it just doesn't look good to be caught blatantly abusing one's market power.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/07/09/jeff_bezos_offers_authors_a_bribe/feed/16Clinton’s real “hard choice”: Bypass the media — or learn to master ithttp://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/clintons_real_hard_choice_bypass_the_media_or_learn_to_master_it/
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/clintons_real_hard_choice_bypass_the_media_or_learn_to_master_it/#commentsFri, 13 Jun 2014 14:38:00 +0000Joan Walshhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13700327So there I was trying to write a sober piece on Hillary Clinton’s occasionally tedious but enlightening book “Hard Choices,” and what it tells us about the kind of president she would be if indeed she runs, when along comes the sort of controversy that derailed her 2008 campaign: her unnecessarily combative interview with a not entirely listening Terry Gross on whether Clinton’s “evolution” on marriage equality represented a true change of mind, or a recognition that it was finally politically safe to admit what she’d always believed.

Watching the controversy, and the unanimously anti-Clinton media coverage that followed, made this already belated review even later. But it reinforced something I was realizing while grappling with the book: Writing a memoir wasn’t necessarily the best preparation for running for president again, if indeed that’s what Clinton plans.

There are still plenty of reasons to have chosen to spend a year recuperating from the grinding pace of running the State Department by writing, with a supportive team. By her own admission, Clinton got to read and think and turn what must often have seemed like four years of global Red Rover into a coherent narrative of how she wove the multiple, sometimes contradictory strands of U.S. diplomacy into “smart power.”

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/clintons_real_hard_choice_bypass_the_media_or_learn_to_master_it/feed/182“It’s total moral surrender”: Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice systemhttp://www.salon.com/2014/05/19/it%e2%80%99s_total_moral_surrender_matt_taibbi_unloads_on_wall_street_inequality_and_our_broken_justice_system/
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/19/it%e2%80%99s_total_moral_surrender_matt_taibbi_unloads_on_wall_street_inequality_and_our_broken_justice_system/#commentsMon, 19 May 2014 21:45:00 +0000Elias Isquithhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13677123His relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever.

Salon sat down last week with Taibbi for a wide-ranging chat that touched on his new book, the lingering effects of the financial crisis, how American elites operate with impunity and why, contrary to what many may think, he's actually making a conservative argument for reform. The interview can be found below, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/05/19/it%e2%80%99s_total_moral_surrender_matt_taibbi_unloads_on_wall_street_inequality_and_our_broken_justice_system/feed/155Paul Ryan’s much-needed history lesson: What he really needs to learn about urban povertyhttp://www.salon.com/2014/04/29/paul_ryans_much_needed_history_lesson_what_he_really_needs_to_learn_about_urban_poverty/
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/29/paul_ryans_much_needed_history_lesson_what_he_really_needs_to_learn_about_urban_poverty/#commentsTue, 29 Apr 2014 15:49:00 +0000bzeffhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13662773Paul Ryan is intent on learning about poor people, a new glowing profile by BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins explains, and he's going to do it by talking to some. Ryan, you'll recall, recently opined that a “tailspin of culture” within inner cities is effectively causing urban poverty, remarks that demonstrate just how much the congressman is in need of education on the topic.

The central problem with his remark about culture is that it ignores the long history of poverty within the urban centers of our country. Whereas Ryan and the GOP would like to present this dilemma as merely a cultural divide, a closer look at U.S. history shatters this oversimplified narrative. Back in the late 1800s, muckrakers like Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens described a strikingly familiar world where gangs, crime, and corruption reigned within American cities. This was an era when inner cities were dominated by European immigrants, not African-Americans, yet still faced the same poverty and strife of today.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/04/29/paul_ryans_much_needed_history_lesson_what_he_really_needs_to_learn_about_urban_poverty/feed/31Elizabeth Warren’s really not running for president — and other big takeaways from her bookhttp://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/elizabeth_warrens_really_not_running_for_president_and_other_big_takeaways_from_her_book/
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/elizabeth_warrens_really_not_running_for_president_and_other_big_takeaways_from_her_book/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 16:24:00 +0000Joan Walshhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13658053Admit it, you’re reading this post about Elizabeth Warren’s new book, “A Fighting Chance,” with one question: What does it tell us about whether she’ll run for president?

Sure, she says she won’t, but her book is coming out in the second year of her first term, just like “The Audacity of Hope,” by another freshman senator, Barack Hussein Obama. He also spent his first 18 months in Washington denying he’d run for president before turning on a dime and jumping into the 2008 fray. In Mother Jones, Andrew Kroll argues the book itself is proof she’s running, because otherwise, “why’d she write a campaign book?”

In fact, “A Fighting Chance” convinced me Warren will stick to her word. (What I feel about that, I’ll discuss later, so keep reading.) Why write a “campaign” book, if not to run for president? First of all, I’d argue that it’s better than a campaign book, though it has its clichéd moments. More than even the literary Barack Obama, Warren is a writer of books; this is her fifth; that was his second. She understands that politics is about stories, and she’s got a good story: of being born into a loving but struggling Oklahoma family at the middle of the last century, which was a time when kids of struggling families could rise:

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/elizabeth_warrens_really_not_running_for_president_and_other_big_takeaways_from_her_book/feed/49Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “When you’re not a white male writing about white male things then somehow your work has to mean something”http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_when_you%e2%80%99re_not_a_white_male_writing_about_white_male_things_then_somehow_your_work_has_to_mean_something/
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_when_you%e2%80%99re_not_a_white_male_writing_about_white_male_things_then_somehow_your_work_has_to_mean_something/#commentsThu, 13 Mar 2014 22:59:00 +0000Anna Northhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13618241Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel "Americanah" crosses lots of borders. It spans three countries -- the U.S., Nigeria and London -- as lovers Ifemelu and Obinze meet, separate and meet again. But it also straddles the sometimes adversarial worlds of fiction and the Internet: entries from Ifemelu's blog, "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” get prominent placement amid the action. Ifemelu comes from Nigeria -- where, she says, "race was not an issue" -- and "Raceteenth" chronicles her experiences in a country where it very much is.

"Americanah" is a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and was named one of the 10 best books of 2013 by the New York Times, but Adichie's also gotten press lately for her social commentary. Beyoncé famously sampled her TED talk, "We should all be feminists." And in February, she wrote an open letter criticizing a new Nigerian law imposing stiff penalties for gay couples who marry or show affection publicly. Adichie spoke to Salon about "Americanah," the Internet and whether she's a political writer.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2014/03/13/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_when_you%e2%80%99re_not_a_white_male_writing_about_white_male_things_then_somehow_your_work_has_to_mean_something/feed/8Borges wasn’t apoliticalhttp://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/making_meaning_out_of_mess_how_we_read_jorge_luis_borges_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/making_meaning_out_of_mess_how_we_read_jorge_luis_borges_partner/#commentsSun, 25 Aug 2013 19:00:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13459229MARK O’CONNELL on The New Yorker’s "Page Turner" writes astutely about Borges’s complex reflexivity in “Two New Books about ‘Borges,’” a review of new publications from New Directions, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (translated by Katherine Silver) and Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature (translated by Willis Barnstone). O’Connell says of Borges’s interviews:

There’s something fascinatingly Borgesian about the way in which the self-awareness of the performance is itself highly performative. This preoccupation with the divided self veers close to a sort of ontological double act, a one-man odd-couple routine.

And he describes well a peculiar stamp of Borges’s fiction:

Borges’s writing was always, to some degree, a creative form of reading, and many of his best fictions were meditations on the condition of fictionality: reviews of invented books, stories whose central presences were not people but texts.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/making_meaning_out_of_mess_how_we_read_jorge_luis_borges_partner/feed/7Herman Melville, great American readerhttp://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/herman_melville_the_great_american_novel_reader_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/herman_melville_the_great_american_novel_reader_partner/#commentsSun, 25 Aug 2013 12:00:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13459080The Library Foundation of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Public Library are launching a month-long celebration of Moby Dick, a way to encourage readers "to discover or rediscover the great literary masterpiece, Moby Dick, through the lens of the modern and equally mythical Southern California state of mind." Over 8o events city-wide, whale watching, a twitter contest and more (details at whateverhappenedtomobydick.org). We asked novelist, critic, essayist, and editor William Giraldi for this piece on Melville, reading, and writing to help kick it off.

¤

IN THE GENERAL RARE BOOKS COLLECTION at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville's tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville's marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and Xs reveal the passages in Paradise Lost and other poems that would have such a determining effect on Melville's own work.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2013/08/25/herman_melville_the_great_american_novel_reader_partner/feed/16Hell is self-promotionhttp://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/read_me_recognize_me_buy_me_why_i_hate_self_promotion_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/read_me_recognize_me_buy_me_why_i_hate_self_promotion_partner/#commentsSat, 03 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13397945I HATE FACEBOOK. I hate Twitter. I spend a lot of time on both. At least a solid hour a day. I also maintain a website, have a Tumblr, an Instagram account, a tour website, a tour page, and a YouTube channel. Since I don’t feel comfortable posting much about my personal life, almost the entirety of my time online is spent promoting one of my books. I usually do it somewhat obliquely, using random jokes to deliver the requisite dose of self-serving self-deprecation. But there is no doubt that in every instance, like a Jehovah’s Witness or shady mortgage financier, I am blatantly hawking some aspect of what I have chosen to view as a career.

]]>http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/read_me_recognize_me_buy_me_why_i_hate_self_promotion_partner/feed/38Gore Vidal still holds uphttp://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/re_re_reading_gore_vidal_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/re_re_reading_gore_vidal_partner/#commentsSat, 03 Aug 2013 16:30:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13397735THE DAY AFTER Gore Vidal's death (a year ago, July 31, 2012), I was prepared to go on in a world that was slightly sadder, a tad more lonely, and, as Vidal himself had said about the perfunctoriness of death notices and the fleeting fame of literary figures these days, "that would be that." Instead, the next morning, I stumbled into a Facebook catfight. One of my FB friends (who I'll leave nameless) was having a conniption fit about, of all people, Gore Vidal. It was one of those intemperate "I'm glad the bastard's dead" kind of eruptions.

Along with the unkind posthumous sentiment, there was a string of adjectives ticking off Vidal's alleged failings. I don't have the verbatim list at hand (it's kind of technically difficult to dredge up old Facebook conversation threads, but I'm sure the remarks are safely stored on some Internet "cloud" or deep in the bowels of the National Security Agency's Prism program computers). As I recall, the litany included most of the standard jibes about Vidal: elitist, patrician snob, conspiracy theorist, racist, and oddly, "judeophobe."

]]>http://www.salon.com/2013/08/03/re_re_reading_gore_vidal_partner/feed/27Mohsin Hamid: I don’t believe in realityhttp://www.salon.com/2013/07/16/novelist_mohsin_hamid_im_ambivalent_about_the_future_of_my_country_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/16/novelist_mohsin_hamid_im_ambivalent_about_the_future_of_my_country_partner/#commentsTue, 16 Jul 2013 21:27:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13370879MOHSIN HAMID HAS WRITTEN a nearly flawless third novel. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was a young man’s overly jaded representation of his generation’s depravities in a transparent act of purging. The second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was similarly purgative, as he sought to distance himself from his engagement with the West’s capitalist project, punctuated by his return to Pakistan. In this third novel, he could not care less about explicating modern Pakistan’s pathologies, though that is ostensibly the scaffold. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is Hamid’s first truly mature book, and the confidence he shows in not desperately needingto represent Pakistan to any particular constituency is reflected in the innovative form and structure.

¤

ANIS SHIVANI: I prefer to read your three books as parts of a sustained trilogy. Many connections between the books become apparent once one does so. Do you see the books as a trilogy too?

]]>http://www.salon.com/2013/07/16/novelist_mohsin_hamid_im_ambivalent_about_the_future_of_my_country_partner/feed/0He is Legend: Remembering sci-fi author Richard Mathesonhttp://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/he_is_legend_remembering_sci_fi_author_richard_matheson_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/he_is_legend_remembering_sci_fi_author_richard_matheson_partner/#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 18:56:00 +0000edicksonhttp://www.salon.com/?p=13336523Richard Matheson was a rare giant of science fiction, though his name was little known outside those circles of souls who lived their lives between dog eared pages of ancient paperbacks scavenged from used book stores. His name didn’t tend to get much air play outside of that small world of science fiction lovers, despite the repeated adaptations of his novels to the screen. It’s a shame that so many who did run across his name, only did so in passing while reading about one movie or another.

But his words were poetry made prose, with that talent for adding just enough of the alien to render the familiar world magnificent and awe-inspiring. His science fiction tiptoed just on the edge of the world we lived in every day, making it crackle with a connection to reality that was beyond the grasp of many of his more famous contemporaries who wrote so much further beyond the ken of the mundane. Stephen King has said that Matheson was the single largest influence on his writing.